When you were young, Fred Flintstone and Bugs Bunny kids vitamins got you to chew up all the nutrients your little body needed. Then you became a grown-up and had to stick to boring pills and capsules. Although someone realized that capitalizing on a women’s right to a daily chocolate fix might be a smart marketing move and launched Viactiv calcium chocolate chews in the late 90s, it took a while for that ethos to make its way to other supplements.

In the past few years that the candy-as-supplement market for grownups has exploded with an even more sweet-tooth-friendly supplement: gummy vitamins. Not only can you find a multi gummy with vitamins and minerals, but there is a gummy version of many single supplements you might to take—from D to B12 to iron. And there are now even multis disguised as mints. Rejoice! Candy that’s good for you!

Of course, it is said that you can have too much of a good thing. And, sadly, this does apply to gummy vitamins. Sigh.

First there’s the issue that candy is candy, even if it has vitamins in it.

“They contain more sugar than many other vitamins, although it’s a small dose and not likely to have much impact on your health when taken as directed,” Ginny Messina, a registered dietitian and author of Vegan for Her: The Woman’s Guide to Being Healthy and Fit on a Plant-Based Diet, tells SELF.

But—taken as directed? C’mon, these are gummy vitamins. The dose is usually two, but shouldn’t they have made it six? The typical calorie load for that two-piece serving is about 10 calories’ worth of sugar (2-3 grams), which is not much on its own. But if you are absentmindedly snacking on your “healthy” gummy bears and end up sucking down 10 pieces over the course of the day, we’re talking about 50 calories or more from added sugar, which is half the daily limit for women suggested by the American Heart Association, just from your vitamins.

But more importantly, you actually can get more of many vitamins and nutrients than is recommended if you’re overdoing it on gummies—especially multivitamins.

It’s hard to overdose on most nutrients from food (which is where we’re ideally supposed to get all of our nutrition). But the pharmacological doses you get from supplements are a whole different matter. The Institute of Medicine determines “dietary reference intakes,” or the daily minimum and maximum levels of nutrients a person should get from both food and added supplements. In general, supplements can offer from around 10 or 25 percent of the recommended level to up to 4,000 or 10,000 percent of the DRI for some nutrients. Gummy multivitamins, at least, seem to skew slightly lower, ranging as low as 33 to 50 percent of the DRI for some nutrients to 100 to 250 percent for others.

Taken as directed, these percentages are considered safe. But eat them like candy and they could cause problems. It seems implausible, but people (especially kids) have gotten hurt—even died—from excess supplementation. The American Association of Poison Control Centers reported more than 50,000 cases of adverse effects from vitamins in 2014.

So what happens if you chomp on too many?

Some fat-soluble vitamins such as A or beta-carotene, and E, and minerals like iron, can build up to toxic levels quite easily. One part of DRI is the “tolerable upper intake level,” or UL, which is the most you can take of a nutrient before you run the risk of adverse effects. The UL for vitamin A, for instance, is 10,000 IU, which is surpassed if you eat just five of some popular gummy multis. Too much vitamin A can cause dizziness, nausea, headaches, skin irritation, and joint pain (and in rare instances, coma and even death). Just four gummies that contain 10 mg of niacin per serving puts you at the upper limit, above which you could experience “flushing” (burning, red, tingling sensation on skin), nausea, or vomiting. Too much iron can give you stomach pains at best and cause convulsions or be fatal at worst. You can gauge how many gummies are really too many by checking out the percent of daily value for each vitamin and mineral on the label.

Water-soluble vitamins are perceived to be safer because they dissolve in water and so any excess tends to be flushed out in urine. But even too much of these can lead to adverse effects, like diarrhea from excess C. And keep in mind that you may be taking in more supplemented nutrients than you realize from the fortified foods you might eat—such as breakfast cereals, plant or dairy milks, drinks like Vitamin Water, as well as from protein bars or shakes. And this isn’t even counting the actual food you eat every day.

The bottom line is that yes, technically, you can OD on gummy vitamins.

So you should stick to the serving size on the label. (And, OK, doubling it probably won’t kill you—but eating an entire bottle is a terrible idea.) In the big picture, though, if you eat a healthy diet full of plenty of vegetables, you really don’t need to be taking vitamins all the time anyway. And if you really just want gummy bears, that’s OK, too.